YYZ OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY 09 SEPTEMBER 2011
YYZ Artists' Outlet
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OPENING RECEPTION ANNIE DUNNING | FOOLPROOF FOUR: SUPERHEROES OF THE FOREST FLOOR SAT 10 SEPTEMBER 2011 - YYZUNLIMITED DAVID COURT + JOSH THORPE | AROUND YYZ SHANNON GERARD | UNSPENT LOVE, OR, THINGS I WISH I TOLD YOU GALLERY HOURS FOR INTERVIEWS
click titles to order online LATEST RELEASE Byproduct: On the excess of Embedded Art Pracitces YYZBOOKS is pleased to announce the publication of its latest book, Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices. Byproduct presents texts from a variety of artists, activists, curators, and interdisciplinary thinkers that interrogate projects by cultural practitioners ‘embedded’ in industries, the government, and other non-art sectors. Working with the physical systems and symbolic languages of these institutions, these cultural agents develop projects – or ‘byproducts’ – that produce meaning contingent on their hosts. Whether the works are explicitly polemical or instrumentalized by their hosts is up for debate… With contributions from Tejpal S. Ajji, IAIN BAXTER&, Claire Bishop, Joseph del Pesco, Kate Henderson, Luis Jacob, Michelle Jacques, Steve Mann, Amish Morrell, Joshua Moufawad-Paul, Darren O'Donnell, Josephine Berry Slater, The Yes Men, Camille Turner, Stephen Wright, and many, many more. ALSO Art and Cold Cash decentre Performance, [Performance] and Performers Pro Forma - Full Series afterthoughts | ANNIE DUNNING | FOOLPROOF FOUR: SUPERHEROES OF THE FOREST FLOOR
Canadians have an understandable fixation with surviving in the natural world. This is evident in cultural production ranging from Roughing it in the Bush, Susanna Moodie's 1852 account of survival in Duro, Ontario, to Mimio's own Survivorman, which airs on the Outdoor Life Network and Discovery Channel. Foraging for edible and medicinal gems has, for most Canadians, become quite removed from our actual means of survival, yet it persists as a pursuit for some, and part of a dream of self-sufficiency for many. Foolproof Four: Superheroes of the Forest Floor is an installation of four large ceramic sculptures of mushrooms, each sitting on its own plinth. On the walls are four different posters of blank, speech bubble templates, which are downloadable, freeware graphic tools for comic book designers. Around the base of each mushroom and on the floor are over 8000 custom-made buttons. There are three sets of buttons. One illustrates superhero logos for each of the mushrooms and another features empty speech bubbles in four different styles taken from comic book templates. The third set suggests possible «superpowers» of the Four with terms taken from scientific descriptions of the life-cycle of mushrooms: Autodeliquescence, Telemorph, Spore Liberation and Cytoplasmic Fusion. Perhaps Shaggy Mane with its curious character of autodeliquescence (self-digestion) is a force to be reckoned with. And surely they have the united power of spore liberation. The buttons themselves look like mushrooms multiplying and popping up from the floor, spreading and intermingling with the buttons of the other mushrooms. Viewers are invited to take a button, allowing the project to travel spore-like outside of the gallery to other locations. ANNIE DUNNING received an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Mount Allison University and a MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and abroad in Japan, Germany and the United States. Dunning’s practice includes collaborative projects, teaching, artist residencies and lectures and has been funded by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council. DIL HILDEBRAND | BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Cranking, 2011, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.5cm. For this, his first solo exhibition in Toronto, Dil Hildebrand presents a new body of work. Back to the Drawing Board represents a focal shift away from the photographic and toward a diagrammatic approach to the image; an incarnation that abandons the image altogether. DIL HILDEBRAND was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and obtained his MFA from Concordia University, Montreal in 2008. In 2006 he won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition and has since participated in many exhibitions throughout Canada, the United States and abroad. Upcoming exhibitions include group shows at OBORO, Montreal (curated by David Elliott) and Espace Virtuel, Chicoutimi. In 2010, Hildebrand participated in the 4th Beijing International Art Biennale 2010 in Beijing, China, and produced Long Drop: The Paintings of Dil Hildebrand, a monograph by Anteism Press. With critical texts by Louise Déry, Richard Rhodes and Christine Redfern. Long Drop surveys a selection of Hildebrand’s paintings on canvas and paper from 2006 to 2009. His work has been collected by major museums throughout Canada, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the National Gallery of Canada. Dil Hildebrand is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. He lives and works in Montréal. DAVID COURT + JOSH THORPE |
Around YYZ, 2010. Image courtesy of the Artists. YYZUNLIMITED invites artists to imagine and reinvent YYZ as a site of opportunity through a series of “interventions”. These interventions engage potential sites outside of YYZ’s regular programming. YYZ is pleased to introduce an audio intervention by David Court and Josh Thorpe. Court and Thorpe present the last in a series of four audio tours of the area surrounding YYZ. This tour features a conversation with Scott Sørli and Flavio Trevisan about YYZ itself. This audio tour is part of the year-long project, Around YYZ, for the YYZUNLIMITED programme. These audio walks are informal, meandering conversations, offering a casual but analytic inquiry, beginning at YYZ and moving out from there. Each lasts approximately an hour and can be encountered in three ways: 1) on an MP3 player borrowed from YYZ (allows the listener to walk the tour while listening), 2) over a set of speakers at the threshold to YYZ, and 3) on the YYZ website. Taking YYZ as the point of departure, the walks extend the mode of attention of the gallery into its surrounding contexts, seeking to draw attention and add complexity to the experience of public space. DAVID COURT is an artist and writer living in New York. He has exhibited solo and collaborative projects across Canada and in New York, with current and upcoming projects for Printed Matter (with Josh Thorpe) and the 2011 CAFKA Biennial. David was involved as a contributor for the publication «Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975 – 2008,» co-published by the Center for Contemporary Canadian Art and Plug In Editions. He has written reviews and catalogue texts for publication in Canada, China and the US, including C Magazine, Fillip, and Art Papers. In 2008 he participated in the residency «Making Artistic Inquiry Visible» at the Banff Center. David holds a Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2009) and a BFA from NSCAD University (2006). JOSH THORPE is an artist and writer living in Toronto. He has a Master’s in Visual Studies from University of Toronto and he teaches at Ontario College of Art and Design and U of T. His work has been shown in Canada, the US, and Europe. His involvement in publishing has produced interviews, articles, and books, including Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide (Art Metropole) and a monograph on the unrealized proposals of Gordon Lebredt (CCCA and Plug In ICA). SHANNON GERARD | UNSPENT LOVE, OR, THINGS I WISH I TOLD YOU
UNSPENT LOVE, or, Things I Wish I Told You, 2010. (Detail). Image courtesy of Shannon Gerard. Originally drawn and written as a series of online vignettes for the comics publisher Top Shelf Productions, Unspent Love addresses themes such as hope, fear, and human frailty. The project was later produced as a multi-media bookwork with the support of Open Studio’s Nick Novak Scholarship (2010). SHANNON GERARD received her Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education Degrees from York University in 1996, where she completed her Masters Degree in 2007. In 2008 she received the Visual Arts (Emerging) Grant from the Toronto Arts Council. Gerard has exhibited her work in Canada and the United States including Green Lantern Gallery in Chicago (2009), Open Studio in Toronto (2008), and also took part in the MoCCA Festival in New York City in 2007. Gerard currently teaches courses in print media and nano-publishing at OCAD University. UNSPENT LOVE has been generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council. |
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